Tangrams
What are tangrams?
A tangram is a Chinese puzzle consisting of 7 shapes.
- Two large right triangles
- One medium sized right triangle
- Two small right triangles
- One small square
- One parallelogram
The 7 shapes can be fitted together as a large square, rectangle, or triangle. The children manipulatedthe plastic sets of tangrams. Then they made their own tangrams from paper and finally they arranged the tangrams in a variety of of ways and created animals, people etc.
Tangrams help to develop spatial awareness. When playing with tangrams children:-
classify shapes, develop positive feelings about geometry, gain a stronger grasp of spatial relationships,
acquire a precise vocabulary for manipulating shapes (e.g., “flip,” “rotate”),
learn the meaning of “congruent”
Spatial thinking is what we do when we visualize shapes in our “mind’s eye.” It’s the mental feat that architects and engineers perform when they design buildings. It’s what Michelangelo used when he visualised a future sculpture trapped inside a lump of stone.
Magnetic Boats
The challenge was to make a boat from recyclable materials which had to float when pulled by the force of the magnet.
Did you know? The biggest magnet on earth is the earth itself. It’s core is made out of iron and hot nickel and so it attracts everything towards itself. Therefore,
we have the laws of gravity.
Seashore Safari
-
- Bladder wrack seaweed
-
- Baby crab
-
- Saw wrack
-
- A shrimp
-
- sea gut
-
- A starfish
-
- Upside down limpet
-
- On safari
-
- Exploring
-
- Balancing
-
- Posing
-
- a blenny
-
- Taking a break
-
- On Seashore Safari with David Horkan Marine Explorers
-
- Cockle and mussel on left hand
-
- A crab exoskeleton.
-
- Mark left by a limpet.
-
- A limpet is a gastropod, this is his foot .
-
- Razor shell is a bivalve.
-
- Lug worms
-
- Mussels are bivalve molluscs.
-
- Anemones are invertebrates (spineless) and are relatives of the jellyfish. They have tentacles that are retractable and have a slimy surface to help keep the moisture in.
-
- Sea potato
-
- Holding a sea hare
-
- Feels like a slug
-
- Sea hare squirting purple ink.
-
- Digging to China?
-
- Seashore Art
-
- Take 3 for the sea.
Materials
We have been investigating how materials dissolve in cold water and warm water. We used equal amounts of water and stirred each mixture twice. We learned that the amount of stirs helped the dissolving process.
Scratch Junior
We are doing projects using the Scratch Junior App on the iPads. Scratch is an excellent tool to use to help develop STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) skills.
